Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The Shortest Route to Fine Dining

New York has the most Michelin starred restaurants (77) in the USA. San Francisco is not too far behind with 54 Michelin starred restaurants. Elite politicians in Washington DC have to slum it however, as the capital only has 12 starred restaurants.

The prestigious Michelin Guide has been rating U.S. restaurants since 2006. To mark the arrival of the 2017 U.S. Michelin Guide, travel site Orbitz has created an interactive map plotting the location of every Michelin starred restaurant in the United States. They have also calculated the shortest route to take if you want to visit them all.

The Michelin Star Spangled Roadtrip can help you find your nearest Michelin starred restaurant. If you click on a restaurant's marker on the map you can find out its address and click through to visit the restaurant's website. If you want to visit all the Michelin starred restaurants on the map you will need to drive 3,426 miles. If you were to dine out at one restaurant a day, it would take you five months to eat in them all.

This route around all the Michelin starred restaurants is an application of the Travelling Salesman Problem in computer science, a mathematical problem which seeks to find the shortest possible route between a given number of points. There are other great optimal road trips available to American car drivers. For example you can visit every major state landmark or visit every National Park.

If you live in the UK then you might want to try the UK Pub Crawl Map instead, which is a handy guide to the optimal route around 24,727 pubs.